Diane Miller, JD, is a Minnesota attorney and Legal and Public Policy Director of the acclaimed National Health Freedom Coalition (NHFC) and its sister organization, the National Health Freedom Action (NHFA). NHFC is a national information resource for health freedom decision-makers and leaders, to support them in their work of protecting access to healing options of all kinds.

Miller’s work involves state, national, and international health freedom issues, such as state safe harbor exemption laws for homeopaths, naturopaths, and herbalists, so that traditional practitioners will not be charged with the practice of medicine without a license, and expansion of state laws to allow medical professionals to practice holistic care without being disciplined.

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by Manfred Mueller, RSHom(NA), CCH

“Once again, history repeats itself. One states it, another quotes it, in the end many state it, and in a matter of years it becomes public opinion – this fearsome power, void of intellect, crushing, inaccessible to all arguments of reason.”

—C. Hering

Myths sometimes develop from inadequate research or from unfounded assumptions. Take, for example, the recent claim that Hahnemann was a “Grand Master of Freemasonry.”

The article Quiet at Köthen by Dr. Jurj (Simillimum, Vol. X) cites Hahnemann’s alleged return to Freemasonry and surmises that Hahnemann had become interested in metaphysics at Köthen. Jurj advances that Hahnemann’s later work represented a change from his earlier “radical empiricism” to more “speculative, theoretical assumptions,” which included a “spiritual conception of disease” and an interest in “metaphysical philosophy.” He concludes with speculations that Hahnemann must have been a “Grand Master Freemason.”

A homeopathic myth is born…

Dana Ullman quotes Jurj’s assumptions as fact in his recent book, The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy. “It is not surprising to know that Hahnemann was a Freemason as early as 1777; he was later granted the title of Obermeister, or Grand Master (Jurj, 2007). In this esoteric fraternal organization and secret society, men shared certain moral and metaphysical ideals.” Read more

Introduction

Homeopaths have described observations that tumors recede from the use of homeopathic treatment and have, from time to time, documented long-term recoveries from cancer in response to homeopathic treatment.1-23 Some practitioners have reported observations like this in as many as several hundred patients.24 Unfortunately, until about two decades ago, there were very few sound scientific studies corroborating these clinical observations. Citing this paucity of high-quality scientific evidence, regulatory agencies have been reluctant to endorse homeopathic treatment as an alternative or an adjunct treatment in cancer. However, the situation may be changing. Homeopathic treatment of cancer is now supported by state-of-the-art laboratory studies.”

A few years ago, I was asked to be a consultant on the Research Review Committee and the Editorial Committee for an NIH educational grant on teaching complementary and alternative medicine at the Program on Integrative Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC. While working with this group, consisting mostly of medical faculty and staff, I noticed that academic texts on complementary and alternative medicine are written almost exclusively by academicians within conventional medicine — by authors lacking practical or personal experience with the field they write about. Furthermore, in the research articles I reviewed for the project, I repeatedly came across profound misrepresentations of the basic homeopathic tenets by established scientists who are writing about homeopathy.

I was pleasantly surprised to read, in 2003, an article on homeopathy by Prof. Anisur Rahman Khuda-Bukhsh in the Journal of Molecular Chemistry entitled, “Towards understanding molecular mechanisms of homeopathy.” I was impressed that he actually explained the laboratory technique of potentization in this article, unlike some of his western colleagues who seemed to work hard to obscure the difference between simple dilutions and potentization. Here was a scientist who had thoroughly understood the theoretical principles of homeopathy. He was not only clear about the key questions, but also had the ability to communicate his understanding with clarity and the necessary detail.

“The verifications of Hahnemann convince those who have intellectual integrity for scientific conviction, who will not sacrifice their intellectual integrity to the idols of the day, who will repeat Hahnemann’s experimental verifications of his scientific observations and inductions as they should be repeated. Any other method than to take into the healthy body four drams of China twice a day to prove or to disprove the symptom similarity of China and intermittent fever is not a scientific experiment for the observation of Hahnemann.”

–James Krauss, M.D., September 30, 1921, introduction to the Sixth edition of the Organon of Medicine; translated by William Boericke homeopathic research

Over the past decade, scientists and medical researchers have used sophisticated research methodologies in order to prove or disprove the efficacy of homeopathy. Based on their findings, editors of prestigious medical journals have concluded that there is no scientific validity to our therapeutic approach [1]. Given the high stakes of this research, the investigators’ command of the homeopathic subject matter and the underlying assumptions reflected in these studies need to be carefully examined. Read more